A theory of affluence

Looking at the scene in places like Gaza and, closer to home, Oakland, it has been my observation that those communities have been hijacked by young men with guns. Nineteen-year-olds with shotguns or AK-47s rule the streets and hijack the social and political aspects of their respective communities. Poverty and violence are endemic […]

CNET: McCain woos techies at AlwaysOn Conference

“Presidential hopeful John McCain asked the technology sector for help fighting “Islamic extremism” and global warming at a conference here on Wednesday.” The full story. “Fighting Islamic extremism”? How…?

The new ‘Gilded Age’

From a NYT front-page story about the ‘New Gilded Age’:
“Only twice before over the last century has 5 percent of the national income gone to families in the upper one-one-hundredth of a percent of the income distribution — currently, the almost 15,000 families with incomes of $9.5 million or more a year”
We live in an […]

Happy 4th to all…

Linda has a really nice, thoughtful piece on First Blush about the 4th of July, and what it has meant to our family. During John’s ‘little boy’ years in South Pasadena, July 4 was an exhausting, exhilarating celebration of family, neighborhoods and ’small-town’ suburban life.
Today we’ll be barbecuing (maple-mustard marinated chicken breasts from Schaub’s) […]

Gang rule

Linda and I watched the near-future thriller Children of Men last night, the DVD being a birthday gift from John and Julie. The premise is that it’s the year 2027, no human has been born for 18 years, and the world, including the UK, is a very chaotic place. Our protagonist is contacted by a […]

Bush and Benedict

President Bush met with Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican yesterday. While Benedict brought up the topic of Iraq, he seemed to be concerned with the place of Christians in Iraq, according to the NY Times report. The topic of ‘unjust war’ apparently did not come up.
Hard to believe men of faith, Christians, would not […]

A commuter’s path…

This morning, we decided to travel with our Nikon D50 and its new ‘Christmas’ 12-24mm lens, rather than the Lumix, our new, ‘normal’ commuter camera, for some reason, and it was the Nikon combo that snapped this pic.
Lately we’ve been walking from San Jose Diridon station to Adobe on the path that goes straight from […]

Words from the 8th century, B.C.E.

Micah was an eighth-century prophet, B.C.E. (before the Christian Era) a contemporary, perhaps a disciple of the prophet Isaiah, according to Robert Ellsberg’s All Saints, a tome from which it is our custom to read the concise life of a ’saint,’ both the Church-declared sort and the actual kind, each day. Last night I read […]

The essays advance… a little

The labor in 21st century essay advanced a bit today on the train up to the city. Still needs a lot of work. I also finished, for time being, researching the faith essay (I finished Wired’s recent article on faith and the new atheism). I’m also rewatching films about faith, mostly Sci Fi: Contact, Titan […]

Enemy of the state

We bought a movie from iTunes last night, just to see what the experience was like. The movie starts as soon as the first bits are down, but it stalled frequently as playback overtook download. We watched an hour of Enemy of the State, quite the topical flick given the current US government’s […]

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